Tags: benjamin-netanyahu, donald-trump
The recent collapse of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the consequent snapback of sanctions against Iran have heightened tensions, with the renewed measures including a weapons embargo and restrictions on uranium enrichment. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced isolation at the UN General Assembly as he rebuffed international support for Palestinian statehood.
Nicholas J. Fuentes framed the week’s Security Council vote as the terminal collapse of the 2015 Iran nuclear bargain and the trigger for a second, larger fight. “The snapback sanctions from the original Iran nuclear deal, all the way back from 2015, they are going forward,” he said. He specified the process and timing: the snapback was “triggered at the end of August,” the effort by China and Russia to delay it failed in a Friday vote, and “the sanctions are going to come down this weekend,” with implementation “on Sunday, local time in Iran.” He listed the measures that revive automatically under the JCPOA enforcement clause: “That means weapons embargo. That means sanctions on key Iranian leaders. That means a complete ban on uranium enrichment and plutonium refinement,” along with asset freezes, financial restrictions and ballistic test limits. The Security Council resolution backed by Beijing and Moscow, he noted, “received only four votes in the 15-member council,” and European delegations argued Iran had not made “concrete commitments” to verifiable changes.
Fuentes built a detailed chronology to argue the policy train left the station years ago. He traced it to the Obama administration assembling the P5+1 in 2015 to cap enrichment and subject Iran’s program to IAEA cameras and inspectors, then to Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal and sanctions campaign, followed by the IRGC terror designation and Qassem Soleimani’s killing in January 2020. He inserted a 2025 track of diplomacy and escalation: in April, he said, Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu he would give Tehran “60 days” for a deal; the E3 nations and the IAEA then assessed “in the middle of June” that Iran was out of compliance, leading to the legal basis for a snapback. According to Fuentes, Israel immediately launched a two-week “preemptive” air operation inside Iran, with waves of strikes on Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, air defenses and command nodes, while the United States dropped bunker-busters on fortified enrichment plants to “render them inoperable.” He described the aftermath in July: “Iran expels all of the IAEA inspectors,” turns off monitoring cameras, and refuses European preconditions to re-admit inspectors and disclose enriched uranium stockpiles.
He then walked through what he said happened next. Europeans threatened snapback in July and August unless inspectors returned; Iran offered a late agreement “last week” for the IAEA to re-enter, which he said cleared Iran’s National Security Council and legislature, yet the E3 still “decide they’re gonna go forward with the sanctions anyway.” That decision, Fuentes said, detonated the tentative IAEA understanding and led to Friday’s failed Russian-Chinese attempt to buy six months’ time. “The Europeans say, ‘Nope,’” he recounted. “They said, ‘Iran is not showing us a true willingness to negotiate.’” The result, he said, is that the JCPOA’s enforcement hammer falls back into place without any inspection mechanism operating on the ground. “Think about how much has been lost here,” he argued, pointing to the original seven-party 2015 alignment — the U.S., EU, Russia, China and Iran — and the subsequent whiplash of withdrawal, sabotage, assassinations and covert strikes.
Fuentes’s reading of the military balance and next steps was blunt. He asserted that Israeli sabotage has driven Iran into a domestic crisis of brownouts, fuel scarcity and water shortages, producing “massive protests,” while repeated strikes on scientists, ports, refineries and grid infrastructure have pushed Tehran toward the one deterrent that changes the calculus. He said Iranian officials have warned that if snapback takes effect, Tehran could exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby signaling a legal basis to “build a nuclear bomb.” He linked that threat to the presumed Israeli decision-making cycle: “Israel will not wait for Iran to get a bomb,” he said, because planning now must assume that “Iran still has centrifuges,” still holds a stockpile and could enrich to weapons grade quickly. If Israel believes the next round is “use it or lose it,” he continued, then a second strike is not just likely but locked in by each side’s survivability math. “A second Iran war is inevitable,” he said, arguing that with inspections dead and sanctions biting, “both sides are expecting a preemptive attack from the other.”
His ultimate claim is that diplomacy did not just fail but was sabotaged. He cited Trump’s “60-day” overture allegedly blindsiding Netanyahu; the “preemptive” Israeli air campaign he placed within that window; and the U.S. bunker-buster strikes he said were justified in Washington as a way to “declare victory and end the conflict” by collapsing tunnels and ventilation systems that kept centrifuges running. “Why would Iran negotiate now?” Fuentes asked, after what he called a sequence of broken commitments, attacks during talks, and a European refusal to trade inspections for sanctions relief even when Tehran offered inspectors’ return. He closed by naming a trigger to watch: “The sanctions come into effect on Sunday. We’ll see next week… will Iran make good on their threat… to pull out of the NPT? If Iran pulls out of the NPT, you’re going to see things go from zero to 60 very quickly.” In his telling, the Security Council’s vote moved the clock to one minute before midnight.
The episode cast Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Friday address to the UN General Assembly as a moment of visible isolation. Fuentes described a near-total boycott inside the hall: “Almost every other delegation at the United Nations got up and left when he started speaking,” he said, calling the image of Netanyahu at the dais “speaking to a completely empty room” a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier, when the 2015 Iran speech drew cheers and “37 standing ovations” on Capitol Hill. He reported Netanyahu’s line against statehood recognition: “He said that he would not allow the global community to shove a Palestinian state down the throat of Israel,” directly rebuking recognition moves by “France, the UK, Canada, and other countries” and what Fuentes portrayed as Donald Trump’s statement “yesterday” from the Oval Office that Washington would not allow annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. In Fuentes’s framing, that sequence marked “a head-to-head, public, explicit confrontation between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel.”
He highlighted two other specifics from New York. First, Netanyahu’s Spartan metaphor: “He said that maybe Israel has to become like Sparta,” Fuentes recounted, arguing the prime minister presented a country willing to live as “a complete pariah” while “doubling down” on Gaza operations with “the backing of the War Cabinet and the Knesset.” Second, a candid aside to U.S. internet personalities. “He literally said, ‘We are fighting a war on social media to get people to support Israel,’” Fuentes said of a side panel with influencers. “What are the two most important platforms? TikTok and X,” he quoted, adding that Netanyahu explicitly analogized operations in “Gaza… Lebanon, West Bank, Syria, Iraq” to online information battles: “Just like we’re fighting using drones and modern weapons… we’re also fighting using the social platforms.” Fuentes interpreted the remarks as a public acknowledgment of state-aligned digital campaigning: “They’re giving the game away,” he said.
Fuentes argued that Western governments now face a cost for shoulder-to-shoulder alignment as governments in Latin America, Africa, Asia and even the Arab states rattle the cage. “They’ve lost everyone in Latin America, everyone in Africa, Russia and China, everyone in Europe, everyone in the Middle East, even Egypt,” he said, referencing a document he said described Israel as “an enemy.” He sharpened the point by noting that “more than 150 countries” recognize Palestine and that “The US is the sole member of the UN Security Council that has not recognized Palestine,” contrasting Washington’s strategic need for partners in the Indo-Pacific, Africa and the Gulf with the diplomatic drag of defending policies “we don’t even support” in their details. The practical consequence, as he put it, is that the United States is “prevent[ing] the world from sanctioning Israel” and spending capital to keep Israel inside multilateral forums just as a global competition with China and Russia requires building coalitions elsewhere.
He rejected the idea that Israel’s trajectory is purely a Netanyahu problem. Fuentes cited Knesset vote counts and public polling to argue the policy is structural: “It’s like 99 out of 120 members of the Israeli Knesset are in favor of this policy and 80% of Israel supports the policy,” he said, invoking an op-ed “a couple of days ago” by opposition leader Benny Gantz in the New York Times as proof that “you’re not against Netanyahu… you’re against the bipartisan security consensus of the whole nation.” He portrayed Israel’s shift after 7 October as a widely shared determination that “they cannot tolerate the existence of a Palestinian state so close to their population core,” and he characterized the Gaza campaign as an annexationist program the entire governing spectrum would sustain “if Netanyahu was replaced by a vote of no confidence” or at “the next elections in the spring.”
The prescriptive piece of his argument was delivered in confrontational terms, and he attached names and organizations to his claim about Washington policy constraints. He said the United States “is attached at the hip with Israel,” and that any president trying to “put his foot down and restrain Israel” would face a political and institutional counterattack from AIPAC, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Anti-Defamation League, major Jewish federations, “Wall Street, BlackRock, Hollywood, [and] mainstream media.” He also asserted that Israel’s nuclear arsenal creates “nuclear blackmail,” invoking the so‑called “Samson option” if the country felt existentially threatened. Those contentions, offered to explain why an American president has not leveled sanctions or conditioned arms transfers, were coupled to the anecdote of a president publicly clashing with Netanyahu while the Israeli leader vows to “finish the job” in Gaza from the UN rostrum and talks openly about a “war on social media” on the conference sidelines.
In closing, Fuentes said the empty hall during Netanyahu’s speech marked more than bad optics; it was, in his view, a measurable policy break. He contended that “pariah status” is already here, that the United States has to decide whether to continue spending diplomatic currency to defend it, and that the move that would “save” U.S. strategy is the one no president seems able to execute: conditioning or cutting support until concrete changes occur. “We’re the only ones that can stop them,” he said, adding that the present path “drags us with them” into isolation at the very moment Washington needs votes and partners in other theaters. The starkness of his prescription matched the starkness of the images he emphasized from New York: a boycott inside the General Assembly, a prime minister promising no statehood under pressure, and a digital campaign the Israeli leader described as a new front alongside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.